Introduction

“When your body is not aligned [],

The inner power will not come.

When you are not tranquil within [],

Your mind will not be well ordered.

Align your body, assist the inner power [],

Then it will gradually come on its own.”

—Ancient Chinese Guanzi Text (26 BCE)

It’s an ironic experience to walk into an event focusing on wellness and witness thousands of people hunching over their respective chairs, in an air-conditioned box, under beaming artificial lights, alternating between staring down at their cell phones and back up to the expert on stage pontificating on an illusory idea of optimal health. This scene would be confusing at best for our hunter-gatherer ancestors steeped in a more natural lifestyle that Westerners so often attempt to emulate. We are “standing on top of a whale while fishing for minnows,” as Joseph Campbell said, and that whale is the way you move. Your vitality is determined by far more than overpriced supplements, complex dietary dogmas, or the latest fitness trends. The way you move impacts every aspect of your life and can be leveraged to make you feel stronger, more confident, and at home in your body.

The fundamentals of optimizing your life to move pain-free and feel your best are simple and teachable; this book contains the foundational principles for doing so. The collection of ideas within this book represent thousands of years of research from the world’s preeminent thought leaders on all things movement and wellness to form the ultimate guide for physical inhabitance. What does that mean? Physical inhabitance is the way you sit, stand, walk, breathe, look, touch, listen, communicate, and generally occupy your body in any given moment during the day. It’s a choice to either passively allow life to slip by or to actively engage in the ongoing process of growing into yourself. In the coming chapters, you will learn exactly how to leverage each moment of the day to become the strongest, sharpest, and most stress-proof version of yourself.

WHY I’M TELLING THIS STORY

I began my journey in a similar place as many young people: insecure and unsure how to feel confident in my own skin. Growing up with the body of a confused baby giraffe, a set of crooked teeth, and a bowl cut would be challenging for anyone, but things became especially interesting when my home life began deteriorating. Enter compensation in the form of fitness. I worked out relentlessly in a vain attempt to create a strong body to act as a fortress within chaos. When I was around age sixteen, it was no surprise to receive a call telling me my dad had finally been taken to prison on a slew of felony charges ranging from possession of crack cocaine to illegal weapons to prostitution. Before that call, the drugs had wreaked so much havoc that I would relentlessly rehearse in preparation for receiving a much bleaker message, so the news he had been locked up was oddly comforting.

In retrospect, this was the beginning of my interest in the way thoughts and emotions form our physical structures and, reciprocally, the power movement has to influence our mental, emotional, and physiological makeup. After several years of insulating myself with muscle by obsessing over bodybuilding in a variety of unhealthy ways, things finally began breaking down—I started to suffer from dislocating joints, chronic back pain, and an underlying, ineffable sensation of disconnect. My body appeared to be the peak expression of a fit male, yet internally I felt ashamed and out of place. It became clear something needed to change: I had been so focused on pushing for the most impressive-appearing exterior, I hadn’t realized I was grinding myself down while simultaneously pushing others away. I needed to change the way I treated my body and re-form my definition of strength. It was time to stop pushing and start balancing. This eventually became the foundation for my work with clients, assisting them to find ease in their own bodies and gain relationship with themselves by accessing the power of their own movement.

The Align Method represents the tools and practices I’ve encountered over the past sixteen years of professionally seeking physical, mental, and emotional balance for myself and the amazing clients I’ve had the opportunity to work with. It isn’t just reaffirming the traditional definitions of exercise, but rather is about how to merge movement awareness into daily life so each moment becomes an opportunity for greater alignment and vitality. It isn’t a static method as much as it is an approach to life. Bruce Lee said “Set patterns, incapable of adaptability, of pliability, only offer a better cage. Truth is outside of all patterns.” This is a principles-based field manual on occupying your body to burn fat, build muscle, increase energy levels, and move better as you grow older.

Where did the belief emerge that our bodies are constructed to inevitably break down with age? This is simply not true. Yes, these bodies are loaners, and we’ll trade them in sooner or later, but the manner in which you age is a choice based on how you live today. The modern environment no longer naturally forms us into strong, flexible, aligned bodies—we need to pay special attention to lifestyle and movement function to be smarter than the misaligned modern world we occupy.

I’m warning you ahead of time: There will be aspects of the book that won’t seem exactly “normal” or “comfortable.” That’s the whole point. The modern definition of “normal” is, for the most part, a state of imbalance. Long-term success is the product of making more balanced decisions on a momentary basis. Your movement and lifestyle could be compared to a golfer driving a ball: the subtlest of changes upon the moment of contact may not be immediately noticeable over the first few yards, but with time and distance traveled, those initial millimeters are the difference between the ball happily landing on the green or shanking into the rough. The standard club angle of modern culture is slightly askew, and this is an opportunity to readjust using the lessons to come in following chapters. The evolution of our species is dependent on those of us who are willing to be different, so be proud of your pursuit to think and move beyond the pale of normalcy.

Let’s get started.